October Reading Challenge Update

October is almost over, and I won't be finished all three of my October Mini-Challenge books by tomorrow, but I was kind of chuffed to realize I'd fulfilled all three of the mini-challenge prompts! So while it is still October, I'll give myself props for doing that, and offer an update on the Connections Challenge I was working on too.

The October Mini-Challenge prompts asked readers to choose a book featuring a mythological, princess, or first responder character, since those are popular costumes. For the Trick or Treat prompt, choose a book with either a sugary sweet character or a mischievous character. And then to choose a book with a scare level of cozy, mysterious, or "keep you up all night".

1. Pick Your Costume: I picked the First Responder costume. In While the City Sleeps by Elizabeth Camden, the hero is a police lieutenant named Jonathan Birch. Our heroine Katherine has a big-time crush on him so I'm imagining him as pretty swoon-worthy. Katherine is a dentist, and she thinks that the babbling of one of her patients while under the influence of laughing gas revealed his connection to bomb threats in New York City, so she takes the information to Lieutenant Birch. I definitely won't finish this one right away, but it fit this prompt!

2. Trick or Treat? I've been listening to the audiobook version of Someone You Can Build A Nest In by John Wiswell, which I thought was a good book choice for October. The main character is a shape-shifting monster named Shesheshen, and maybe she could be described as mischievous, although in a very scheming and secretive way. Shesheshen has a human love interest named Homily who is definitely very sugary sweet. By the way, Homily does not know that her 'girlfriend' is actually the monster her entire family has been hunting in order to break a curse, so the dynamics are interesting, to say the least. I'm almost finished listening so this review will be coming soon.

3. Pick your scare level: I just finished The Terrifying Tales by Edgar Allen Poe, and it's an excellent spooky season read. While it isn't "keep you up all night" in the way modern horror films have conditioned us to think of scary stories, some of these short stories are quite sinister and disturbing. No jump scares, no crazed chain-saw-wielding lunatic stalking you in your nightmares, but the prospect of a madman murdering his landlord because of his eye, or the realization that the Cask of Amontillado might have been the perfect murder that left no clue, are terrifying indeed. If I have time, I'll review this one tomorrow.

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The 52 Book Club's summer mini-challenge was the Connections Challenge. Instead of a list of prompts that can be done in any order, the idea of this challenge is that each book is connected in some way to the one before it so it must be done in order. There are twenty-one links in the connection chain and I knew I had no chance of finishing during the summer, but I figured I'd work on it and see how far I could get by the end of 2025.

1. Pick any book. Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn was my choice. (Read my review HERE)

2. The title of this book must share a word with the previous book's title. Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery shares the word "of" in the title. (Read my review HERE)

3. Village Books by Craig McLay is set in Canada, where the author of the previous book is from. I wasn't a big fan of this book, and it took me a long time to get through it, which slowed down my entire Connections Challenge progress. (Read my review HERE)

4. I found a book in my Kindle library that was published the same year as the previous book. No Safe Harbor by Elizabeth Ludwig (Read my review HERE)

5. The next book on my nightstand TBR stack was within 30 pages, so that worked out well. Murder Most Fair by Anna Lee Huber (Read my review HERE)

6. I happened upon a book at the library I wanted to read, and it did have a reasonably similar title font. Food For Thought: Essays and Ruminations by Alton Brown (Read my review HERE)

7. I was presented with a challenge here, because the author of the next book is supposed to share a name with a character in the previous. And the previous book was non-fiction. But Alton Brown mentions his wife Elizabeth a number of times, so I picked out While the City Sleeps by Elizabeth Camden, which I'm still working on. This book is doing triple duty in the reading challenges!

So here's where I am at the moment, not even a third of the way through. To think that others did this over the summer, and many of them did this in addition to the regular 52 Book Challenge! So as I originally planned, I'll keep going at least till the end of the year and see where I wind up, and probably just keep plugging away until I finish.

And this is the current status of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge. A bit short of halfway through, but there's only two months left in the year. I'm okay with it!

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